The sound of Mira falling through the splintered floorboards was swallowed by the hiss of expanding chemical steam and the heavy, metal clatter of iron transport shackles.
Ren Vale dropped through the smoking crater after her, heedless of the jagged floor beams that tore through his woolen apprentice smock and gouged bloody furrows along his ribs. He hit the debris-strewn floorboards of the second-story apartment with a bone-jarring crash, rolling across broken plaster, shattered crockery, and smoldering straw. The impact knocked the wind from his chest. But he scrambled to his feet instantly, his boots slipping on powdered lime and wet soot.
“Mira!” he choked out, coughing through the blinding sulfuric fog.
Ten feet away, in the center of the demolished tenement room, Julian Voss stood flanked by four private court guards in heavy lead-lined aprons and spiked iron gorgets. Two junior guards held loaded heavy steel crossbows leveled at the stairwell, while two tunnel diggers with crowbars stood guard over the iron stretcher.
Mira lay on the transport stretcher, her slender body locked in rigid, unnatural immobility. The four ounces of Vitric Sclerosing Compound, Formula Nine had worked with terrifying, chemical savagery. From the deep puncture wound in her right shoulder, thick, branched veins of dark amethyst crystal had burst outward beneath her pale skin. It wrapped her right chest muscle wall, her collarbone. Her entire right chest cage in a many-sided armor of dense stone. Her right lung was solid quartz. Through the semi-clear, purple-veined crystal of her chest, Ren could see the frozen, branching dark shape of her lung tree, sparkling with tiny violet micro-fractures that hummed with a high, sound whistle.
Her left hand lay curled against her chest bone. Her fingers grabbed the fringe of her torn wool shawl. Her silver-grey eyes were open, glassy, unfocused. It was locked in the waking total numbness of deep pharmacological frozen stillness. Her lips were parted slightly, unable to draw air. But her left lung continued to heave in shallow, painful spasms that made the crystal plates across her breast chime like cracked bells.
“Step back, boy!” one of the junior guards yelled, leveling his heavy steel crossbow at Ren’s chest.
Ren didn’t step back. He ducked under the quarrel’s flight path, threw an iron kettle from the hearth straight into the guard’s face. Then he drove his shoulder into the man’s breastplate. The guard crashed into the brick wall, his crossbow discharging harmlessly into the ceiling plaster.
“Secure the sound hood right away,” Julian Voss commanded. His voice as were calm, brisk. Then he detached as an auctioneer logging a bale of river cotton. The notary adjusted his cobalt-tinted glasses with the back of a rubberized glove. He ignored Ren entirely. “If the lattice vibrates during transit, the ringing feedback will propagate micro-fractures through the subclavian artery before we reach the marshalling yard. Clamp the lead plates. Secure the brass turnbuckles.”
Two court guards stepped forward, carrying a heavy, domed iron hood lined with sheets of tiny hammered lead. They lowered it over Mira’s head and chest. They locked it to the iron rails of the stretcher with heavy brass turnbuckles.
Clank. Clank-tumbler.
The sound of the latches engaging was the terrible, permanent finality of an iron coffin being sealed for eternity. The sound chime from her chest was muffled instantly, reduced to a dull, choking shaking that rang through the lead casing.
“VOSS!” Ren screamed, his voice tearing from his raw throat like shredded linen.
He surged forward from the floor, his mammoth ivory awl raised like a spear in his right hand. Every nerve in his body burned with pure, pure homicidal fury. He didn’t see the four armored guards. He didn’t see the cocked crossbows. He only saw the burgundy wool collar of Julian Voss’s judge’s robes.
He lunged, driving the needle-sharp silver tip of the awl straight toward the hollow beneath Voss’s left ear.
He never reached him.
From the smoke-choked archway behind the shattered wardrobe, a huge shadow stepped into his path with the weight of an iron drop-gate.
Court guard-Captain Corvus Thorne.
The massive court guard was limping heavily, his right knee drenched in dark blood where Ren had pierced his tendon with the awl on the third-floor landing. But the physical agony had only transformed the man from a corrupt town officer into a rabid beast. Thorne didn’t bother swinging his heavy iron maul. He simply stepped forward and swung his left gauntlet—a solid mass of four-pound cast iron and studded leather—in a brutal, backhanded arc that split the air with a whistling shriek.
CRACK.
The iron gauntlet struck Ren across the left temple.
The world exploded into a blinding flash of blazing bright white light, followed by total, ringing darkness. Ren was lifted fully off his feet and hurled backward across the room, his skull slamming into the brick chimney breast with enough force to dislodge two courses of stonework.
He fell face-first to the floorboards, numbed, his ears shrieking with a high, ear-splitting whistle that drowned the sound of the storm outside. Blood poured from a deep split across his hairline. It ran into his left eye, warm, thick, and smelled of copper and salt. He tried to push himself up, but his arms were noodles of trembling water. His vision doubled, tripled, spinning in a nauseating vortex of soot and falling snow.
Through the red haze of his one working eye, he saw Thorne limp toward him across the broken timber.
The court guard sneered down at Ren, his single eye burning with sadistic pleasure. He raised his heavy iron cavalry boot, positioning the iron-rimmed heel directly above Ren’s right hand. The hand that held the four-inch mammoth ivory awl against the floorboards.
“You like your little bone needle, don’t you, apprentice?” Thorne rasped, his voice shaking with poisonous cruelty. “You think you can forge leases and rewrite crown law with a dead beast’s tooth? Let’s see you mend a contract without it.”
Thorne brought his heel down with all his three-hundred-pound weight.
SNAP.
The ancient mammoth tusk—the tool Ren had carried for eight years, the instrument with which he had scraped forty-year-old leases, forged royal bonds. Then he held his sister’s life together against the grinding poverty of Low-Khorat. Shattered into two jagged pieces against the oak floor.
A sharp, electric spike of spirit recoil tore through Ren’s chest. In the Lexicon of Binding, a keeper’s main tool was not merely a piece of bone. It was the physical anchor of his skilled intent. When the awl snapped, the invisible thaumaturgical deep ring connecting Ren to his craft collapsed like a breached dam. His stomach heaved. A wave of icy nausea flooded his mouth. He tasted the bitter bile of complete contractual failure.
Ren choked on a mouthful of blood and sawdust, unable to cry out as the court guard ground the broken ivory into the grit with his iron heel.
Across the room, two court guards hoisted Mira’s lead-lined stretcher onto their shoulders. They carried her toward the rear freight lift that opened onto the courtyard alley. There, the black-lacquered drays waited in the freezing sleet.
Julian Voss paused at the doorway. He pulled a gold gear catch watch from his waistcoat, checked the time. Then he looked down at Ren lying broken in the soot, his cobalt glasses catching the dull grey morning light.
“Master Notary Corley trained you well, Vale,” Voss said smoothly. He wiped a fleck of plaster dust from his burgundy lapel with fastidious care. “Your forgery on the tenancy lease was almost competent. A clever exploitation of the sovereign safe hall rider. In a country high court, a sympathetic judge might have granted you a forty-eight-hour stay of execution. But property in Val-Khorat doesn’t belong to the scribes who write the words. It belongs to the syndicates who have the iron to enforce them.”
Voss stepped forward, his rubberized boots stopping two inches from Ren’s bleeding forehead.
“Your sister is already invoiced to the High Spire,” Voss continued. His voice lowered into a cold and exact, steady beat. “Her intake docket is stamped with the Royal Seal of the Ministry of Mines. Her serial number is logged in the Royal Register under Article Nine. Living Stone Assets of Exceptional Purity. By noon, she will be bolted into Lord Malakor’s breathing mask. You should be grateful. In his palace, her stone will sing for men of quality, instead of rotting in this miserable attic while you starve on turnip greens.”
Voss turned back to the doorway, signaling the heavy cart drivers with a short whistle.
“Load the sample into Crate Seven,” Voss commanded the yard men. “Double the chain binders. If the sound hood resonates during the transit across the cobblestones, administer two minims of sulfur-ether. I’ll not have my reputation damaged by a chipped gemstone.”
Voss stepped through the door, following the stretcher into the sleet.
Thorne stayed for a second, his single eye glinting with malicious triumph. He nudged the broken half of Ren’s ivory awl across the floorboards with his iron boot, kicking it straight into the smoking debris of the hearth.
“If you’re still breathing when the morning watch comes by, Vale,” Thorne growled, adjusting his blood-soaked knee bandage with a grimace, “I’ll have the carcass-collectors throw you in the lime pit with the tanners’ dogs. Don’t look for the train, boy. You don’t have the fare, and the tracks don’t lead to beggars.”
The court guard turned and limped out, his heavy iron boots echoing down the stairwell until the outer courtyard gate slammed shut with a final, echoing crash that shook through the foundation stones.
In the alley below, the iron-shod wheels of the four drays began to roll, iron rims grinding against the frozen slush as the horses were whipped into a trot. The sound of the convoy faded into the howling wind, heading north toward the Grand Central Marshalling Yard.
Silence settled over the ruined room.
Snow drifted through the shattered roof, falling softly upon Ren’s face, melting against the burning cut on his temple and mixing with his tears, his sweat, and his blood.